For those of you who have played World of Tanks it is quite similar, a free-to-play online game where you fight in relatively short matches for money and experience which you use to buy and outfit new spaceships.

So far it is incredibly polished and quite impressive for a beta, I've had no issues with disconnections or slowdowns, the worst I can say about it is that occasionally the matchmaking system takes a minute and a half instead of the more usual 20 seconds.

Can someone explain the difference between EM, Thermal and Kinetic Damage? I know they have different multipliers versus hull and shields, but what are the exact numbers?

I just started out today, had some spare time so I dumped a couple hours into it. Some impressions:

1. What faction you pick affects what implants your character can take and what ship tree you have access to. I didn't know this, but I got lucky because I picked Imperial and I found that I like their ships. The only way to switch is with a paid transfer token. Each empire has a fighter, interceptor and frigate. And each of them has a different special ability. They are very different from each other and some are faction specific, so do some research before you dive in in case you have a preference in playstyles.
2. Plasma cannons seem to dominate in tier 1.
3. Not having roll control bound to my mouse is throwing me off.
4. I did much better once I understood that I didn't have to constantly fly forward while fighting. Combat is 3d and there isn't any gravity, so it's okay to stop and roll around to keep your guns on target.
5. Scenarios tend to get MUCH harder at wave 3/4.
6. Scenarios give more credits per match, but less reputation/loyalty
7. Game looks great and runs great
8. Surprisingly small install size, especially compared to Warthunder.

Can someone explain the difference between EM, Thermal and Kinetic Damage? I know they have different multipliers versus hull and shields, but what are the exact numbers?

I just started out today, had some spare time so I dumped a couple hours into it. Some impressions:

1. What faction you pick affects what implants your character can take and what ship tree you have access to. I didn't know this, but I got lucky because I picked Imperial and I found that I like their ships. The only way to switch is with a paid transfer token. Each empire has a fighter, interceptor and frigate. And each of them has a different special ability. They are very different from each other and some are faction specific, so do some research before you dive in in case you have a preference in playstyles.
2. Plasma cannons seem to dominate in tier 1.
3. Not having roll control bound to my mouse is throwing me off.
4. I did much better once I understood that I didn't have to constantly fly forward while fighting. Combat is 3d and there isn't any gravity, so it's okay to stop and roll around to keep your guns on target.
5. Scenarios tend to get MUCH harder at wave 3/4.
6. Scenarios give more credits per match, but less reputation/loyalty
7. Game looks great and runs great
8. Surprisingly small install size, especially compared to Warthunder.

EM is typically better against shields, ballistics are typically better against hull, and thermal is typically balanced. The modifiers are actually ship specific. If you hold SHIFT over the image of your ship in its hangar slot or the ship purchase menu you will see its modifiers versus each damage type on the hull and shield, including your implants, passive boosts, etc.

1. Actually your starting faction only dictates your small bonus (+5% Reputation/Gold/Experience for Empire/Federation/Jericho). I assume that's what you spend gold to change. Until you sign up for a contract your reputation goes to that faction. Up on the top you see the Contracts tab, and if you click on that you can sign up with any of the six sub-factions. Once you have signed up with a faction you get equal amounts of reputation with them and with the main faction they are a part of until you change it again. You can break contract and change to another sub-faction at any time, but at an increasing penalty each time. Right now it would cost me 80k to switch, and it seems to go up by 20k each switch, so it's not something you do will-nilly.

If you look at the shop the Mk III items always require reputation with a sub-faction, so you'll want to pick a main faction, then look through to see which one of their two sub-factions unlocks equipment that you'd prefer.

5. Heck yeah they do, I've never been on a team that beats a scenario. I'm hoping to fix that with Goodjers.

6. I have noticed this, but given that Scenarios seem to take so much longer to complete I do wonder if that's a bit of a wash.

1. What faction you pick affects what implants your character can take and what ship tree you have access to. I didn't know this, but I got lucky because I picked Imperial and I found that I like their ships. The only way to switch is with a paid transfer token. Each empire has a fighter, interceptor and frigate. And each of them has a different special ability. They are very different from each other and some are faction specific, so do some research before you dive in in case you have a preference in playstyles.

I'm flying ships from all three factions, using implants from all three factions, and never used a paid transfer token (is that the forged ID?). All I did was take a contract with a faction I didn't start with, earned some reputation with them, paid the small penalty in ingame cash to break the contract and then got a new contract with the third faction. I've since switched back to the first faction, and mix and match ships and implants as needed. Currently at level 3 rep with Empire and Jericho, and level 4 with the Federation, cost me a total of 80,002 credits so far (I think, there may have been another few thousand spent when I switched subfactions in one of the factions, once).

Hey Certis if you see this can we get a new Vent channel for Star Conflict/War Thunder? Maybe with grouping sub-channels.

Yonder wrote:

Up on the top you see the Contracts tab, and if you click on that you can sign up with any of the six sub-factions. Once you have signed up with a faction you get equal amounts of reputation with them and with the main faction they are a part of until you change it again.

Ah I get it now, I couldn't figure out what part of the interface controlled that. I've been playing Wardens. The cost for switching contracts doesn't seem to be that bad. My first switch would cost me 40k and that's just one scenario worth of credits. It increases as you go, but does anyone know what the maximum cap is?

Yonder wrote:

5. Heck yeah they do, I've never been on a team that beats a scenario. I'm hoping to fix that with Goodjers.

I was playing on the Titans scenario last night. The enemy waves include elites who fly frigates, on wave 3 they start using a snipe attack as soon as your shields go down. I found this out the hard way because we managed to beat them down to about 4 ships and then we all suddenly died one by one. Still everyone congratulated on a job well done, so I take it most groups only make it to wave 3? I'm up for group play, though I don't know how much time I'm going to put into the game. I at least plan to "max out" some Tier 1 stuff and and get a good feel for the game.

So far it doesn't feel too grindy but I noticed that everyone gets a free 1 week booster to start out. I have the feeling that things are going to get a little grim for the FTP people as soon as they hit tier 2.

I've been wondering about that premium thing myself. Right now I am typically making 35k to 45k a fight, and losing 2k to 8k. If that premium bonus is really steep, say 100% then things could start getting tough.

The tier 1 stuff (not, this includes the first 3 reputation levels, the tier 1 mk IIs and stuff) everything is pretty cheap, but at tier 2 the price jump is considerable. $560k for my first frigate, and at least that much to outfit it.

Tier 2 is amazing though, in addition to all of the ships having more slots, they have all kinds of new things to put in them. Instead of one railgun, laser, and plasma weapon there are three types of each, good at different ranges. Also, you can switch the damage type of your weapons, you can make lasers EM, railguns thermal, and (I presume) plasma into ballistic, so the resistance game gets a lot more complicated.

I'm most excited about the new active modules though, my frigate can get one that builds a stargate that warps allies 5km forwards. I'm sure that will complicate missions to defend your Captain. Maybe deploy some mine fields?

How does it handle matchmaking by tier for pvp games? In War Thunder you are placed using the tier of your best aircraft regardless of what the other possible 8 happen to be. In Star Conflict I assume it works the same way, only in this case it only counts the three you take into a fight.

In arcade it does place you in the max tier of the three you have brought in, regular may be more complicated, I would kind of hope so, as bringing three tier 2s into a regular fight is much different than 1 and 2. I haven't tried a regular fight with my tier 2 ship added though.

1. Chat seems to be much improved now. If you are in Corporation mode, for example, you only see Corporation talk.
2.There seem to be some new maps, at the very least there is a new PvE Scenario which is pretty cool.
3. IR Flares now confuse player-guided torpedoes in addition to missiles. While one is nearby your torpedo screen gets very static-y and you can't turn the torpedo. As a result the price of the Jericho frigates seems to have dropped.

Always take flares. It might change at higher tiers but at low tier missile spam is very common. A single repair module recharges very slowly and doesn't even fix the amount of damage a missile hit does! Flares on the other hand can recharge very quickly.

There is a lot I still don't know:

1. I get XP per match, where does it go? Is this what is used to synergize?
2. What does synergy do?
3. What are the green numbers in brackets on the stats screen?
4. Are stickers per-ship and lost when you upgrade?
5. What's the max penalty for switching contracts?

Also DO NOT switch flight controls to expert. Horrible idea. All it does is restrict your camera to within a certain angle of your ship. This prevents you from firing sideways!

Always take flares. It might change at higher tiers but at low tier missile spam is very common. A single repair module recharges very slowly and doesn't even fix the amount of damage a missile hit does! Flares on the other hand can recharge very quickly.

There is a lot I still don't know:

1. I get XP per match, where does it go? Is this what is used to synergize?
2. What does synergy do?
3. What are the green numbers in brackets on the stats screen?
4. Are stickers per-ship and lost when you upgrade?
5. What's the max penalty for switching contracts?

Also DO NOT switch flight controls to expert. Horrible idea. All it does is restrict your camera to within a certain angle of your ship. This prevents you from firing sideways!

1. Yes.
2. Synergy gives you passive bonuses to the main ship stats (hull, shield, speed, and energy).
3. Your bonuses for that item, from a variety of sources: implants, ship bonuses, and synergy bonuses being the main ones.
4. I don't know anything about stickers.
5. So today I realized that the penalty for switching contracts is NOT based on how many times you've switched, but on how far you are with the faction you are switching away from. I just spent 100k to switch out of a faction I was rep 6 with. It seems like the switch is free (1 credit) for rep level 1, and then 20k, 40k, etc going up by 20k each time.

Poked at the stickers, thought it was amusing that of the national insignia you can buy/rent, the Soviet big red star insignia was twice the cost of the other nations.

Lol, amusing that the Russians embrace capitalism in even more of a cutthroat matter than over here. (I believe the game is developed by Russians and was released there first, so for a long time that insignia would have been far more popular than any other country, so the Russian developers took that as an opportunity to gouge their own countrymen.)

I poked around on google a bit. The exact formula for changing contracts is 20k*Reputation Level-1. So the higher you go the more it costs you to switch over. I'm currently level 5 with the Wardens and I think I'm going to get to level 6 to get the tier 2 stuff and then switch to another faction like Armada to start training those ships. I don't see much point in going above level 2 just yet because the community isn't that large.

Some things I learned:
- You don't sell ships! The system is very confusing for new players because of this. Basically your ship slots are just slots, you can put any ship you have unlocked into them. Ships sent to the bench retain all of the items you put on them.
- Turrets are capable of firing sideways and even backwards. Interceptors only have 2 guns but they have the best all around field of fire. Fighters have 4 and if you aim too far to the sides only one pair can shoot. Frigates are even more restricted but have 6 guns. Damage seems to be spread evenly over each turret, so the less you have on target the lower your dps.
- I expect sniping to be heavily nerfed. It's just too EASY. Click on the white targeting circle and you will hit 90% of the time. Interceptors die in two shots. Frigates can't move fast enough to evade the beam. You can hit people halfway across the map and the only counter is hard cover, which some maps don't have.
- Lasers are pretty good weapons, but you have to be pinpoint accurate with them. Shield bubbles are very big, ship hulls can be tiny targets. Sometimes I get into a dogfight and burn a guys shields down in big chunks of 400-500 damage and then my damage drops to 20-40 because I can't land a hit.
- The best overall weapon in my opinion is plasma, at least in my experience of tier 1. This is because railguns can't damage hull until they pop shields first, and they aren't very good at that. Plasma weapons burn through shields quickly and even though they do less damage to hull they still come out ahead because it's very hard to repair hull compared to shields. The quicker you can get to the hull the better.

It definitely seems that the game population drops dramatically later in the day for west coast people. The scenarios are fun but when it runs low on people it starts to put tier 1s with the tier 2s and that's an impossible situation. I've never made it past wave 1. So grouping is probably the way to go.

I don't know how deep I'm going to get in this game but I at least plan to reach tier 2 with each faction to try out the different ships. So once we all have some tier 2 ships we can group up and have some fun.

On sniping:
Lol, Warhound hates the snipers too, he really rages about them. And he says I'm a terrible person because I play as one often... Anyways, as an occasional sniper I would say that there are tactics which can definitely frustrate us.

It's true that a Frigate can definitely not dodge a sniper, but they are sturdy enough that it can take 5-6 shots to get through their shields. That is plenty of time to move from one piece of cover to another. A fighter can dodge us at range, but there biggest advantage is how much faster they can get from cover to cover, again too quickly to break through shields in most cases. An actively dodging interceptor can avoid all hits unless he's close enough to be engaged with normal weapons.

Other than bots,which just don't do a good job of recognizing the danger, I have been increasingly unable to kill targets which are not in combat with my allies. Unless they have foolishly flown far away from any cover I just can't do enough damage by myself to kill someone. Now if there are three to four of us together that becomes a lot harder, but that becomes a big risk for the team. If the bulk of the fighting is done behind cover where we can't contribute then they'll be out numbered, defeated, and then the same will befall us. Three to four snipers can't stop three to four enemies who pop out behind a rock (or warp gate) 3 km away.

Other than staying behind cover and not flying straight, you should also look into buffing up your thermal resistance. Both the guided torpedoes and sniper beams do thermal damage, so you can really help protect yourself from long range attacks. In fact, thermal resistance seems to be getting so popular that I would really recommend people that use T2 lasers switch their damage to EM.

Still in T1s, got lucky on loot last night. Purple T1 frigate hull repair and purple T1 lasers. And yes, snipers can go DIAF. IMNSHO, any team PvP game with snipers would be dramatically improved by removing the snipers. Period, full stop, no room for discussion.

I do like the change to the flares, does a lot to counter the Zealots' torps. Just makes the flares even more critical, which is a sad thing really. Any time a game with customization potential gets a system that is 'absolutely must have' then it loses part of that.

For the record my tier 2 doesn't have flares and I don't really miss them.

For me this appears to be a combination of two things - people realizing that the flares have such a long recharge that they aren't really very helpful when you're getting focus fired, and the increased availability of group hull and shield regen making most everyone able to shrug off the single long-range hits that leave you vulnerable in T1.

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools." Herbert Spencer, State-Tamperings with Money and Banks